Best of Times, Worst of TImes

 

The Tale of Two Cities opens with the line; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." Looking at my latest sales report, that line could apply to my report as well. Not that I'm complaining, it is still the best of times when it comes to sales totals. But if you look closer, you can see that those numbers hide, if not the worst of times, a tale of how times have changed in author publishing business, for the worst, for most of us. 

Let's take a look at my sales, specifically how easy or hard it is to sell books, and how it may have changed over the years. I will compare my first year as a publisher, that would be 2015-16, to my last full year, 2022-23. A Summer in Amber was my first book. I released it in late April 2015, followed in July by Some Day Days, and then The Bright Black Sea in September. In those first 12 months I sold 6,608 books. The best way to answer my initial question seems to be to measure those sales with a crude metric, sales per year per book. To do that we simply divide total sales into 3 equal parts, one for each book, even though they were on the market for varying lengths of time and sold in different amounts. What we want is an average sales rate per book per year. Dividing 6,608 by 3 we get 2,202 copies sold per book per year on average in 2015-16.

Now let's compare that average per book sales to my 2022-23 sales results. I sold 19,524 books in 2022-23. A record number. Great! However, since I now have 14 books for sale, we need to divide those 19,524 books by 14, which gives us a sales per book per year average of 1,394 copies! Nearly half of the per book average of 2015-16. It certainly seems that it is getting harder to sell books. Even free books.

But wait! That total included audiobooks. I wasn't offering audiobooks in 2015-16. So if we want a more accurate comparison, we should only count ebooks for 2022-23;which would be 11,326 of them. Divide that number by 14 we get a sales per book per year average of just 809 copies, down considerably from the 2015-16 rate of 2,202. In 2022-23 I'm selling books with about 37% of the efficiency that I was in 2015-16. And this, mind you after having been in the business for 8 years.

But you know what? Those 2021-22 sales numbers above include ebook sales on Google. In 2015-16 I wasn't selling books via Google. I sold only thru Smashwords, et. al. and Amazon. So if we want to accurately study the decline in sales, we need to compare sales rates between 2015-16 and 2022-23, apples to apples. Thus, we should probably count only my 2022-23 Smashwords and Amazon sales of ebooks, which came in at about 6,253 copies. Dividing that total by 14 yields a sales per book per year average of just 446! Yikes! I'm now only 20% as efficient at selling books compared 2015-16 on those two stores. And the 2022-23 number includes the unparalleled sales of 2,790 copies of The Girl on the Kerb. Had that book sold like all the others, the result would have been even lower. More like 300 copies per book. 

So, over the last eight years, I've gone from selling an average of 2,202 copies of every ebook I offer per year down to only 446 copies per ebook per year between Amazon and Smashwords. If sales had continued at the 2015-16 rate I would be selling something like 30,828 ebooks a year on Amazon and Smashwords alone, instead of 6,253. Talk about diminishing returns. Only the fact that I expanded my distribution to Google in both ebooks and audiobooks has kept Cealanda Press chugging along. And Google sales will no doubt fade as time goes by as well.

The simplest explanation would appear to be that I'm not writing books people want to read. There is some validity to this, as my books are not mainstream SF. However, since I've been writing in a very similar style right from the get go, that seems unlike to be the reason for the decline in rate of sales. I think the fact that I write a variety of stories may make it hard to capture every sale from every reader; illustrated by the fact that my space opera, The Bright Black Sea outsells every  book by a significant margin. A slightly more likely explanation is that I may have already reached most of the "low hanging" readers who are open to reading my books, making finding new readers increasingly harder to come by. New books? New books sell more, and I had released three new books in 2015. Well, I release 2 new books in 2022-23 so that newly released books are likely not a factor. While most of the books in my catalog "old," having been around for a few years, that is not a negative. Having a back catalog of books is, I think, a plus in author publishing, allowing a reader who stumbles upon one of your books and likes it, the chance to immediately go on to read more of your books. 

One might also blame the fact that there are way more books available today than in 2015. But even back then, there were way too many books as well, so I don't think this is a major cause in the decline in sales efficiency I'm seeing.

What I think makes it ever harder to sell books is the fact that the author publishing market has consolidated, just like businesses do in the real world... It has become a "big" business, relatively speaking, compared to the good old days of 2012 -16. These days you need to go big or go home. Now an author wishing to publish their book has to approach publishing very much as a business if you want to sell more than a handful of books. And be ready to spend money on it.

Another factor may be that readers of ebooks have found their groove and settled into it. They don't leave it to beat the weeds for new and different reads like they may've back in the early days of ebook publishing. And even if they do search out new books, there are so many books to choose from, that no author publisher can expect to sell many books to these intrepid explorers. 

A final reason may be that Amazon has gotten serious about make even more money off of author publishers by selling, rather than just giving away, discoverability to authors; i.e. they sell ads on every product page. Most of the books you see on any product page appear there because some author paid money to have it there. These ads are critical to finding readers. So much so that I know of several full time fantasy authors who spend "only" $1,000 to $1,200 per month on advertising ($12-18K a year). Of course their sales support those ad buys, but it serves to illustrate the scale of business operations needed to sustain a successful full time publishing career in author publishing these days. One can probably get by on less, if one doesn't need to earn a living from writing, but even so, one can easily spend thousands of dollars, and never see much, if any, of it again.

I have to wonder if anyone starting off as an author publisher today with anything less than a great book, accurately targeted at a lucrative genre/subgenre, and a startup budget in the thousands of dollars will ever sell more than a handful of books. 

Oh well, I guess I can play the "glad game" and say that I'm glad I'm still selling as many books as I am, enough so that the "best of times" numbers do a darn good job of masking the "worst of times" numbers of my publishing business.